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Derf announces ‘Trashed’ graphic novel

Derf Backderf, creator of the acclaimed memoir My Friend Dahmer, has signed a deal with Abrams Books to publish his next graphic novel, based on his webcomic Trashed.

“This past summer, I took down most of the Trashed Webcomic, announced it was permanently retired and instead unveiled an entirely new webcomic, The Baron of Prospect Ave.,” he wrote on his blog. “What I couldn’t reveal at the time was that Abrams had approached me about turning the Trashed Webcomic into a full-fledged graphic novel! I already had a couple new episodes written at that point, with the intention of starting the project up anew this past summer. So those became part of the new book. I spent the remainder of 2013 writing and drawing.”

Trashed, in its original form, was released in 2002 by SLG Publishing; it’s a comic memoir of the year he spent as a garbageman in his rural hometown. When he revisited the project in 2010 as a webcomic, he added fictional characters and situations. As he explained on his website, “It didn’t really happen but, trust me, it’s all too real.”

“The idea is to make this, tentatively titled The Big Book of Trashed, both a compelling tale of young losers and a detailed examination of our nation of garbage, the vast, secret process of what happens to the shit we throw away every day,” Derf wrote on his blog. “Did you know if you took the trash Americans produce in just a single year, we could form a bumper-to-bumper line of full garbage trucks that would stretch all the way to the moon! That’s just one year! It won’t be memoir, like my first Trashed stories. It’ll be fiction based on experience, like the webcomic. Not that it matters. Readers always think my stuff is real no matter how many times I tell them it’s not.”